Two Programs to Help Organize Mailing Lists

Now that the holidays are over and a new year stretches ahead, what better time to think about getting organized? You might begin by setting up a mailing list on your computer.

Two of the largest suppliers of mailing labels and related products have recently introduced low-cost mailing list software to make it easier.

Oxford Mailworks comes with 500 continuous-feed labels and sells for $49.95. Avery List & Mail doesn’t include labels and sells for $59.95. Both programs run on IBM PC and compatible computers and both are likely to be found in office supply and stationery stores, displayed on the same racks containing mailing labels, index cards and other products made by the two companies.

If you think there isn’t much difference between one mailing list and another--meaning it doesn’t matter much which program you buy--you couldn’t be more wrong.

A Business Basic

A decent mailing list is basic to any business, and your initial decisions can affect many aspects of running the business.

For instance, if you can’t link your customer list to your account billing software, you may have to enter all the names and addresses twice.

Even a simple family Christmas card mailing list needs thoughtful design if it is to keep track of when you last received a card from someone, or children’s names and ages. You may also want it to do double duty as a birthday list.

By those standards, neither the Oxford nor the Avery software is truly adequate because their predefined forms don’t let you store enough information, nor do they allow you to add more fields of information.

If your lists are of limited scope, however--meaning basic name-address-phone number, with perhaps several characteristics for sorting purposes, and no link to billings or accounts payable or other business programs--either Avery List & Mail or Oxford Mailworks will serve you.

Of the two, I like the Oxford Mailworks best because it offers more flexibility. Most importantly, only the Oxford program allows you to transfer names and addresses back and forth with other programs such as database, word-processing or spreadsheet programs. That means that if you outgrow its limitations, at least you can copy your mailing list into a more sophisticated program and go from there. To transfer the mailing list from Avery Mail & List to another program, you do it by hand.

The Oxford program also comes ready to print on more kinds of continuous-feed labels, envelopes, rotary and flat index cards and the like than the Avery program. In fact, you can easily use the Oxford program with Avery labels because the program allows you to choose among descriptive names of the 34 types of forms it can print, such as “continuous labels, one-across, 3 1/2 x 15/16.”

Avery List & Mail gives you only the product number of the 14 predefined forms that it supports, such as “4016,” which makes it more difficult (but not impossible) to use other brands of labels.

Being able to print easily on a wide variety of forms, including those that are three labels wide, postcards, rotary index cards and even “HELLO, My name is . . . “ badges is the strength of both programs, and that is something that more generalized database programs and word-processing mail-merge routines simply cannot match. Usually, such programs require the user to instruct the program how to print on forms and often will not even allow two- or three-across label printing.

Avery List & Mail does have some features that I like better than Oxford. For instance, it separates a name into its components-- first, middle initial and last. That allows you to sort alphabetically by last name. (It doesn’t give you room for the period after the middle initial, however, nor does it add one when it prints the label.)

Oxford forces you to type the name twice--once on the “sort line” using last name first and again on an address line so that it will be printed in the normal last-name-last fashion.

Avery also lets you preview your labels by printing on the screen instead of the printer. And it also has a function that lets you see whether the label form is properly positioned in the printer.

Phonetic Search

Of marginal use is Avery’s “Soundex” method for finding a name phonetically when you can’t remember how it is spelled.

It found O’Reilly when I searched for “oriley” and Pollak when I searched for “poleaxe.” But it wouldn’t find Dickson from “dixon” nor Maxwell from “macswell.”

The Avery program lets you sort on two fields, such as by ZIP code and within ZIP codes, by last name. It will also print out a list that tells you how many labels were printed per ZIP code--a big help in submitting a bulk mailing to the post office.

Avery Mail & List has four special fields, each of which can hold a single number or letter to code for characteristics of your choice. You could rate a person by income, assigning a number to stand for each income grouping you wanted to track. Then you could have the program search the contents of that field and produce a mailing aimed only at persons earning more than $30,000, for instance.

Oxford Mailworks also has four special fields, but each may contain up to 10 letters or numbers, giving you much greater flexibility in adding information that will allow you to select out just those characteristics you want to find.

Another advantage of the Oxford program is a “comment” field in which you could list a birthday or spouse’s name or any other tidbit that you need to remember about that person.

While Oxford Mailworks does not produce a listing of labels printed per ZIP code, it does automatically sort labels by ZIP code to meet postal bulk mailing regulations.

Searching with a so-called wild card is another nice feature of the Oxford program. The wild card is the question mark, which is used to stand for any set of characters within a field of data. Thus, searching for ZIP codes “90?” would give you every listing with a ZIP between 90000 and 90999.

I think by now you’ve gotten the idea that there is no such thing as a simple mailing list, and you need to give a lot of thought to everything that you need to do with such a list.

Here’s a suggestion for those who already have a database program and a mailing list but are having trouble printing all the label and index card forms you need. Get Oxford Mailworks and when it’s time to print, transfer just the names you want to print from your database to Oxford and do the printing from there. It’ll take some work to prepare a system for doing this the first time, but the next time it will be easy.

Computer File welcomes readers’ comments but regrets that the author cannot respond individually to letters. Write to Richard O’Reilly, Computer File, Los Angeles Times, Times Mirror Square, Los Angeles, Calif. 90053.